arXiv AI

Speculative Rollback Correction for Quality-Diverse Web Agent Imitation

arXiv:2606. 12485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training interactive web agents through imitation learning from expert trajectories has emerged as a highly effective approach.

arXiv AI
Oct 23

PAUSE: Search-Free Steering of Coding Agents Before Their First Source-Code Edit

PAUSE is a steering framework for coding agents that intervenes once before the agent’s first source‑code edit, eliminating the need for learned monitors, checkpoint searches, or extra model calls. By having a Planner generate a repair plan from the task and pre‑edit transcript, the same agent can resume execution with this plan, preserving context and workspace. Experiments on SWE‑bench Verified and Multilingual show that PAUSE improves resolution rates by up to 16.8% online and recovers 35.4% of failed tasks offline, while reducing Executor token usage by 33‑41% compared to restarts.

By Viral Patel, Boyin Tan, Jason Xue, Youcheng Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Guides That Cause Actions: An Offline Study of Guide-Action Mutual Reinforcement in Multimodal Web Agents

The paper introduces WebMRE, an offline benchmark comprising 541 tasks and 5,293 steps extracted from WebArena trajectories, designed to provide deterministic scoring for web agents without live environments. It enables the first systematic study of how guide sentences and grounded actions reinforce each other, showing that jointly decoding a guide improves element selection accuracy and that the guide acts as a causal instruction channel. The authors fine‑tune models that outperform leading zero‑shot baselines on all offline metrics.

By Chengguang Gan, Yunhao Liang, QingHao Zhang, Shiwen Ni
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Rewind-IL: Online Failure Detection and State Respawning for Imitation Learning

Rewind-IL is a training‑free online safeguard for generative action‑chunked imitation learning policies. It uses a zero‑shot failure detector based on Temporal Inter‑chunk Discrepancy Estimate (TIDE) and a state‑respawning mechanism that returns the robot to a verified safe intermediate state. The system builds a checkpoint library offline with a vision‑language model and monitors self‑consistency online, rewinding execution to the latest safe checkpoint when a failure is detected, thereby improving reliability in long‑horizon manipulation tasks.

By Gehan Zheng, Sanjay Seenivasan, Matthew Johnson-Roberson, Weiming Zhi
arXiv AI
Jul 23

From Trajectories to Prefixes: Reusing Teacher Trajectories via Replayed Prefixes and Online Continuation

arXiv:2607. 19395v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models are attractive backbones for interactive agents, but direct distillation from strong teacher trajectories often turns rich multi-turn behavior into one-shot imitation targets.

By Yihan Wang, Zhong Guan, Haoran Sun, Jiale Huang, Likang Wu, Hongke Zhao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation with Prefix Replay

We study on-policy distillation (OPD) for agentic tasks, where an LLM agent interacts with an environment over multiple turns and a student imitates a teacher over these multi-turn interaction histories. Fully online OPD is costly because each update requires fresh student rollouts through the environment and teacher queries at visited histories.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Agentic Critical Training

Agentic Critical Training (ACT) is a reinforcement learning approach that trains language‑model agents to judge actions directly by pairing expert actions with alternatives and rewarding correct selection. Unlike imitation learning or self‑reflection, ACT does not require reference rationales and can be reused across model sizes. Experiments on Qwen3‑8B and Olmo‑3‑7B‑Instruct show that ACT improves performance on ALFWorld, WebShop, ScienceWorld, and outperforms supervised reflection baselines, with significant gains over IL and IL→RL baselines.

By Weize Liu, Minghui Liu, Sy-Tuyen Ho, Yongkyun Lee, Andrew Adams Schoen, Souradip Chakraborty, Xiyao Wang, Furong Huang
arXiv Computation and Language
Nov 2

TraceSpec: Understanding and Improving Speculative Decoding for LLM Agents

TraceSpec is a framework that links trajectory evaluation with adaptive draft training to improve speculative decoding in large language model agents. It introduces a dynamic execution strategy combined with fixed‑prefix replay and provides a new corpus (TraceSpec‑Traj) of 10,000 training and 2,500 test states covering browsing and software engineering tasks. Experiments show that TraceSpec’s state‑conditioned draft allocation boosts replay throughput by 12.5%–22.6% and increases accepted length by up to 10.0% compared to fixed‑turn supervision.

By Jihao Zhao, Shuaishuai Zu, Pengfei Li, Biao Qin, Guanghuan Fang, Ben Feng, Baochuan Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Step-Level On-Policy Distillation: Interpolating Between On-Policy Distillation and Supervised Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2608. 16333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) aligns a student model with a teacher's logit distribution on student-generated trajectories.

By Changhui Sun, Lanbo Liu, Hang Lei, Tong Ling, Jiahang Xie, Zhiyong Zheng, Yujia Wang, Hao Liu, Feng Xiao, Lu Liu, Yanlong Du, Zifeng Cheng, Ziwei Jiang, Qing Gu